Home » People & Culture (Page 18)

Category Archives: People & Culture

All about the standing-upright chimps that really love to talk about themselves.

Women’s Equality Day

Posted on by | 3 Comments

The long list of calls settled itself into the monotone of routine.  “Hi, my name is Erik, and I’m calling for Jim Scheibel, your DFL candidate for Mayor of Saint Paul.”  The 1989 election was going to be close, so Get Out The Vote (GOTV) calling to loyal Democrats was important.  But just as I let the script propel my calls with their own momentum the soft gravely tone on the other end split the evening open.

“Oh, dear, you don’t have to remind me to vote.  I’ve been voting ever since they let us.”

We’ve been “letting” women vote for 97 years, ever since Tennessee ratified the 19th Amendment on August 26th, 1920 by just one vote.  The anniversary of this landmark event, “Women’s Equality Day”, is a good time to reflect on how young and precarious this precious foundation of democracy is for half the population.

Continue reading →

Presentations That Boom

Posted on by | Leave a comment

It is a bizzy Friday.  I hope you enjoy this classic piece.

You find yourself in a dark room, dazzled by charts and graphs and pictures that go by just fast enough to lose you.   The speaker at the front is well intentioned and trying desperately to make you as enthusiastic as they are, but it’s no use.  Your mind wanders, desperately trying to find something to daydream about that will keep you from nodding off, drooling on yourself, or both.

Here’s something to think about before you drift off into an embarrassing situation:  Franz von Uchatius, General of the Austrian Artillery – and the Grandfather of PowerPoint.

Continue reading →

Google “craven”

Posted on by | 1 Comment

The battle between the US and China is heating up. The stakes are high, having both pride and money on the line. It’s a classic showdown reminiscent of old times.

It looks like 1995, that is, in that a search engine war is just heating up. This one is between google and baidu, the Chinese search engine that rose to dominate the Chinese market after google pulled out in 2010 rather than comply with censorship laws. Google is reversing that decision in a strategic business operation which will leverage …

… oh, who am I kidding. Google is selling out bigtime and crawling back to China. Wow.

Continue reading →

One Giant Factory

Posted on by | 3 Comments

This is a post from 2009, updated heavily.  

Canton, Ohio, is a brick and proper kind of town that most people know for the Pro Football Hall of Fame.  I was there to visit a customer who was kind enough to give one of the new products I was developing a real-world trial.  That went well enough, but Canton itself was a bit of a mystery.  Why is it there?  What did people do that gave them the scratch to create a decent town that was aging poorly?  One night I had to ask my favorite authority on these kinds of questions, which is a random person in a bar – color is always more important to me than accuracy.  But in Canton, Ohio, there is only one answer to the question as to why they exist:

Continue reading →